out of inodes

out of inodes

This article shows you how I dealt with an "out of inodes" problem.

How’d it happen?

I was installing the entire ports tree on a new box. 
It froze.  So I restarted it.  Then it froze again.  OK, this time I
noticed the following messages on the console:

Jul  5 14:25:48 little /kernel: pid 431 (cpio), uid 0 on /usr2: 
                                                     out of inodes
Jul  5 14:26:19 little last message repeated 2550 times
Jul  5 14:28:20 little last message repeated 10276 times
Jul  5 14:28:25 little last message repeated 451 times

inode background

The problem is that we didn’t have enough inodes.  This is a common problem when
you have many files of a small size.  If you look at the man
page for newfs, you’ll see the following:

-f frag-size

     The fragment size of the file system in bytes.  It must be a pow